Usenet clients

Usenet Network

Usenet is a decentralized network, it works by each Usenet server sharing its information with all the other servers on the network. This propagation across servers makes Usenet an ideal place for storing information and data of all types.

Failed Downloads Guide

The biggest reason you'll encounter failed downloads is DMCA takedowns. The post may be removed from servers due to copyright infringement (Notice & Takedown request).

Technical problem (Hardware failure)

The post you are trying is out of your retention. All news servers keep data for a limited time.

Propagation issues, the content has not been completely propagated on the Usenet server you are downloading from, this will only happen on new content (less than an hour old and mostly on sundays). Sometimes posts appear anytime up to 5 hours after they were originally posted. This can cause failed or incomplete downloads for some users.

A file is posted on a Newsgroup that doesn't exist on your Usenet Service Provider.

Solutions for Missing Articles? - Best way to avoid incomplete downloads?

If you want to avoid incomplete files, you have six options:

Your first strategy is having multiple Usenet indexers. Having multiple Usenet indexers increase your chances of finding NZBs that are still online. A good NZB Site could drastically improve your completion rates because NZB Sites are now using obfuscated Usenet. Here are good Usenet indexers that support obfuscation. Usenet is now stealth!

If NZB Sites don’t always solve your incomplete Usenet files, try using a second Usenet provider that uses a different Usenet backbone. Completion rates can vary for a number of reasons so all the Usenet providers have holes somewhere. Instead of completely changing your main provider you can setup a block server in your newsreader. Secondary account should be a block account from a different upstream/backbone than your main account.

The most popular combo I believe at the moment is an unlimited account from Newshsoting. Plus either a Tweaknews or Usenet.Farm Block.

In the table below, we make suggestions for different combinations of primary (unlimited) and secondary (block) plans to enhance your Usenet experience. Here’s a list of Usenet combo:

If you want to avoid the negative consequences of incomplete files, you can consider adding a block account. Luckily, NewsHosting Browser V 2.6.3 implements a new service called "Backup NNTP". You can add a block account from Tweaknews to help you get downloads that Newshosting doesn't have for various reasons.

Having a good NZB Site and a Usenet combo will almost always ensure 100% completion of all the downloads. I would say that a combination of both strategies is ideal.

Improve Completion With Download Automation. The best way to improve article completion is by using download automation tools. Automation tools allow users to grab binary article sets as soon as they are posted to a newsgroup. Skip the stress of incomplete transfers, files are automatically downloaded. There’s a ton of open source packages to automate downloads of pretty much everything as soon as it becomes available online.

On Usenet files need time to propagate to all servers after they get posted. So you need you need to set up your download client to a 20-30 mins propagation. I used to have mine set at 20, but recently I had to up it to 30 and it solved my failures.

Workaround slow Usenet propagation with NZBGet

Sabnzbd also have the Propagation delay feature

Another solution to dealing with corrupted and incomplete files is to use par2 files, if available. Often, articles are missing, but this does not necessarily mean file is broken. With each download you will typically find a set of “PAR” files which are essentially “extra blocks” of data which contain parity information of the files and can be used to piece together the missing articles. It is recommended to use quickpar to manually repair files if needed, opening up one of the par2 files with quickpar will tell you how many more articles are needed to repair the file.

One reason could be that the download is out of your servers retention, this is easy to ascertain, look at the age of the download and compare that to the retention of your news provider, if it’s older than the retention offered you will need to use a Usenet provider with a longer retention period